beetlefeet.net

Optus + Samsung Hmmm

[PIGMI] Gamejam

Testing posterous, vegetarianism over!

Samsung Galaxy S

Samsung Galaxy S (Android 2.1) micro review as requested by more than one person (2 people).

Tech Specs at some random site (gsmarena), Comparison with other Android phones from this year.

The Galaxy is definitely big. It’s not uncomfortably bulky or anything, and is actually quite slim (about the same thickness as the iphone4 except for a slight lump at the back of the base for the antenna). But it has a 4″ 16:9 (1.67, iphone is 1.5 aspect) screen, and needs room for it. The construction is decent but obviously more plasticy and flimsy feeling than an apple device. (definitely try one in the shop before you buy it to see if this bothers you). It is really light for its size. It’s not a really beautiful phone but it’s definitely not ugly. From the front it is blatantly borrowing the 3Gs appearance.

The screen is AMOLED  and is 800×480 (iphone 4 is 960×640). It’s really nice and vivid. Text and UI elements render very smoothly.

I think I noticed some issues with the GPS, although I’m not very experienced with GPS so maybe it’s a case of expecting too much (IE inside a building etc). Also I have read that the default maps application (google maps) has an uncharacteristically long gps sync time as compared to other software on the same device so more investigation is required I guess.

Samsung (and optus) bundle some crap with the device which I’ve largely ignored. Samsung also put their own UI ‘on top of’ android. I’ve not seen a problem with it but apparently HTC custom UI is better. At some point I might have to figure out what I’m missing and see about rectifying it (this phone is easily rooted apparently, allowing you to do all sorts of unsupported things to it. ) But even out of the box you can install downloaded apps and run a file manager and it works as a mass storage device etc. It is so much more open than an iDevice just out of the box.

The down side to that is that you can definitely get it to slow down. A bad app hogging cpu while it is running in the background etc WILL hurt your battery life and slow down the UI in general and cause pauses etc so you need to be a bit technically inclined to keep things running smoothly (or don’t install anything other than stock stuff I guess). Speaking of battery life I assume it’s pretty decent, I’ve not owned a smartphone like this before so am not sure what is good. There is a nifty function in the settigns menu that shows you where you battery has been used, and it is usually 40-60% on the screen.

Swype is a keyboard input system installed on android (you can add also install others) and it blows most other soft keyboards out of the water. Basically you just drag your finger over the letters you want on a keyboard (ie don’t lift your finger up except for between words). and it just works most of the time. You can even be really sloppy and just plain miss letters and it works really well. Checkitout.

Other cool things: Divx playback, just drop movies onto it and they play, no transcoding or going through itunes, same for music. Live wallpaper (silly but nifty), change fonts system wide. Heaps of options.

So yeah, not a very structured or objective review, just a bunch of thoughts. I’m enjoying it so far. I just need a car kit so I can drop the iTouch altogether. (Though I will miss Carcassone).

Lessons learned

Just because you can get sweet usec timestamps on Ubuntu and Vista doesn’t mean the same library will get any decent resolution times out of windows XP.

The default ruby mysql library doesn’t deal properly with > 32bit database ids.

If you want to use > 32bit database primary id’s. Sleep on it. You might not really want to (especially if you get hit by the above point -_-;)

Interzone Craziness

~2 months ago I had to suspend my position at Interzone Games due to unpaid superannuation and shaky payroll. This week it all came crumbling down…

A growing collection of quotes and links about Interzone Games, Big Collision Games, Michael Turner, Marty Brickey and Greg Chadwell.

The summary as I understand it:

This week, Michael Turner from the US office, came to Australia to take the intellectual property for the game. The game would then be finished by another company in the US.

This is while the company has around $1.6 million of Australian debt which includes unpaid Australian business tax, unpaid payroll tax, unpaid employee wages and entitlements and unpaid employee superannuation.

When Mike was met with questions as to how these debts will be resolved, he left the premises. He then came back that night after dark and changed the locks of the building. He barred employees from their workplace (personal belongings still inside).

This was met with peaceful protest and many questions that went unanswered. Then the media were contacted and the police were called by both parties, etc etc.

Most notable was the climax yesterday where employees were ordered off their own workplace by a spokesperson of the Department of Commerce?!

The link above has many links to news reports please check em out if only to bump up exposure
It was quite surreal seeing it laid out on the ABC News last night. :/

Global GameJam Post Mortem

So I worked on a game with: Simon Boxer, Ellen Jurik, Brad Power, Daniel Adams and Robert Barnett (get blogs guys! ><), with help from Jason Hutchens who splintered off early on to make a mini masterpiece: Bogus Quest.

We made “Bored Room” it’s available at http://www.globalgamejam.org/2010/bored-room.

How to get slug?

Some things went wrong:

• Tech – We decided before the jam to use flash (without any experience) and quickly found that getting it to do what we wanted (without reliable internet at one stage for docs and tutes) was too much effort. We slipped effortlessly into old habits and used pygame. Note that this decision was made at like 20? 15? hours till deadline :/ Jason did the same but stuck with flash and succeeded with bells on so big props to him.
• Team size – While I think it helped us in the end (we got a lot of work done fast) the team size really caused some slowdown and friction when deciding on an idea. People are different, in a team people need to be unified. Sorry to everyone if I was a main offender in the struggle to get settled on something. I can be a tool like that :/
• Team size 2 – As a large team it felt (at least I felt) like we had more to prove than a smaller team, this further hindered the choosing of an idea.
• Theme - The theme was a bit restrictive and early on we tried too hard to be too clever about it. We should have just used it to get ideas flowing and then been more relaxed about sticking to it.
• Multiplayer – We didn’t want to do a multiplayer game because it’s harder for people to play. I now think we should have said “Who cares? We can play it!” if we really wanted to do a multiplayer game.

Overall I think I took it too seriously and worried too much. Not next time!

I also learned a dirty secret. Non-’programmers’ are making kick-ass games with fantastic tools such as Construct. *Shakes Fist* Put us programmers out of a job will ya?! But seriously I’m all about doing more making games and less making tech so I’ll definitely be checking construct and similar packages out in future. Are there any that can target flash?

I did ended up having good fun in the end and our team did some amazing work in a short time and produced a game that (albeit with some glitches) is fun and funny. Thanks heaps guys and gal in my team! Thanks also to Anthony Sweet who appeared miraculously with burgers and sundaes in our time of need and then vanished into delicious smoke. And thanks especially to Simon Wittber for setting it all up and being the loving father of gamejamming in perth!

Global GameJam 2010

GlobalGameJam 2010 begins in Perth a few hours (it has started elsewhere in the future world that is GMT+>8). I am crazy excited like it’s Christmas Eve 15 years ago. Hmm make that 20 years ago

Anyway I have some thoughts on how I want to approach it this year.

Make a COMPLETE game. (including engine and tools as appropriate).

I’d love to see and create some games this year that can stand on their own. IE that we could stick on a website (for in browser play or download) and actually say that they are finished products. Games that someone in some universe might spend $5 to purchase or $15 to buy the extended version (more content only).

Games that we can take and extend after the fact.

My own games suffer from this a lot. Ladybug Garden and Troll in particular were both ‘complete’ to the point that I’d implemented most of the features I wanted and managed to tack on 10-15 minutes of gameplay. But I’d rather it was an hour of gameplay, or 20 minutes that left you insanely wanting to know what happens next.

Achieving this level of ‘completeness’ requires a better focus on tools, and a better balance of developing the tech vs developing the game. For example I think having someone in the team actually spending some chunk of time writing story and dialog etc would make for a more interesting end product (If that’s the type of game you’re making). Same goes for tools. If you spend 5 hours hacking in 20 minutes of  ‘campaign’ (with all kinds of hard coding and workarounds) then making the next 40 minutes of the campaign is going to slay you. If you can manage to make a great little suite of tools in 10 hours, and from then on can make an hour of content per hour of dev, that is freaking sweet. Whether there is time for this or not remains to be seen.

If you end up with hacky code that is not extensible (IE our Under One Roof from last years Global GameJam) then the product will end its life there. The prospect of having UOR on iPhone or as a flash game is very compelling to me and it pains me that we haven’t done it yet. But rewriting the game from scratch because it’s utterly unportable is really hard to swallow, especially when there are sooo many other ideas vying for attention and development time.

Basically I think the point I’m trying to make, distilled, is:
Make a product that can have a lifetime, not a something throwaway for the purposes of the challenge.

In order to achieve this I think we should be very wary of feature creep and scope.

The other issue, to confuse matters even more, is that a few of us (notable Kranzky, it was his idea) are planning on learning flash during the gamejam (about time, yes). This means more time scrolling through documentation and less time banging on the keyboard.

It’s going to be a blur.

Well I hope some of that made sense. Have a great Jam everyone!

Google search for programmers

As I’m sure some people reading this will know, Google ignores most punctuation in search terms.

This means searching for things such as “ruby .one?” or “ruby ||= trick” etc are much less helpful than they’d otherwise be.
(Side note, “.one?” is an array instance method that returns true if the array has exactly one item in it. Ahh ruby, you so crazy.)

Every few months this really pisses me off.

Here is a line from google’s basic search help page:
With some exceptions, punctuation is ignored (that is, you can’t search for @#$%^&*()=+[]\ and other special characters).

And if you follow the link the most interesting of the exceptions is:
Punctuation in popular terms that have particular meanings, like [ C++ ] or [ C# ] (both are names of programming languages), are not ignored.

Well thankyou google! For some reason this annoys me even more. There is someone who every now and again (every few months? or maybe they’ve only done it once when google first added punctuation rules?) goes in and adds “popular terms”. Well most of my terms aren’t popular! That’s why I’m searching for them!

I just checked Bing and notice the same problem. Anyone know a more thorough search engine for special use cases? (Don’t get me wrong google is great for most of my searches.)

pumpkincrumble.com

Chrystal and I are becoming ovo-lacto-pescatarians (still eat eggs, dairy and seafood) for at least 6 months as a kind of experiment on the viability of doing it longer term.

This is mostly for sustainability reasons (Many animals cost like 8 times their weight in crops, ie if we ate the crops instead we could feed 8 times as many people.) with some humanitarian reasons thrown in (usually after watching a documentary or reading about it

Anyway we’ve set up a blog called Pumpkin Crumble where we’ll post thoughts and photos of stuff we’ve cooked or ordered at restaurants etc. It’s a little bit more interesting and tricky to come up with tasty meals when all the best ingredients are off limits so it should be funtimes ><;

Wish us luck and checkout the blog if you feel like it!